Time Immortal

I haven’t really been commenting much on Omar Khadr, mostly because until recently there wasn’t much to comment about. Khadr, as I understand it, comes from a Canada-based family that has been investigated numerous times for ties to Islamis terrorism. In fact, aren’t some other members of the Khadr family currently incarcerated for their connections to terrorism?

Be that as it may, Omar is a dutiful son of this family, and signed on some years ago with the Taliban in Afghanistan vis-a-vis his father, who had moved to Afghanistan in 1996 and who later (in the wake of the September 11th attacks, in fact) moved into the mountains of that country, where it is thought that he closely associated himself with Osama Bin Laden (to such a degree, in fact, that the bin Laden and Khadr children were playmates).

Omar received weapons training at some point, produced videos for the Taliban, and was even photographed handling explosives for them. He looks like a fresh-faced youth, but it would seem that at every turn he has chosen to align himself with Islamic terrorists.

Khadr was captured after a firefight between Taliban militants and American soldiers worked out decidedly in favour of the Americans. The battle was fairly intense, requiring air support, and the Americans had thought that all of the Taliban fighters had been killed. Khadr, however, had survived. Confilcting reports exist, but it appears that Khadr took one last opportunity to throw a grenade at approaching U.S. troops before being subdued, mortally wounding Sergeant Christopher James Speer.

Recently, footage of Omar Khadr being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was released to the Canadian public. In it, two CSIS officers interview Khadr about his condition. He appears wounded in the video, and complains of his injuries. Information coming out of Guantanamo isn’t exactly the most reliable, but what evidence is available suggests that Khadr was tortured by U.S. interrogators at various points, using methods such as short shackling and stress positioning, as well as sleep deprivation and a few other methods.

Which, if true, is disgusting. Torture is a grave moral evil, regardless of how depraved the recipient thereof might also be. Yes, Omar Khadr seems to be neck-deep in terrorist connections, and he evidently has no small measure of blood on his hands as well. That doesn’t mean it’s right to torture him.

Now, a brief tangent. I like Matthew Good’s music, for the most part. When he wants to rock, he rocks, and then very well. And his subject matter, while often strange, tends to be a bit deeper and more thought-provoking than one might typically expect of alt-rock and post-grunge music.

That said, I don’t entirely agree with his stance on the Khadr issue:

Legally, Khadr should never have been taken to Guantanamo. International law dictates that he should have been classified a child soldier and treated as such. Instead he was shipped off to the world’s foremost black hole and has been a prisoner there ever since, subjected to God knows what. If FBI documents released this year are any indication, entirely unethical interrogation practices were certainly on the menu.

International law is actually not on the side of Omar Khadr in this matter. For the record, Khadr was 15 when the firefight in which he was captured took place. With that in mind, it should be noted that the UN convention on children’s rights stipulates that “state parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities.” Of course, there are two obvious problem with applying this principle to Khadr’s situation: first, the Taliban are not a “state party”, in that they do not represent a national government but are, rather, a terrorist organization attempting to violently overthrow the government of Afghanistan. The second, of course, is Khadr’s own age at the time of his capture.

There is an optional protocol to the aforementioned UN convention which stipulates that state parties “shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons below the age of 18 do not take a direct part in hostilities and that they are not compulsorily recruited into their armed forces.” Note that this does not explicitly prohibit people between the ages of 15 and 18 from voluntarily participating in hostilities. From what evidence we have available, Omar Khadr very gladly and freely participated in the cause of Islamic terrorism.

Moreover, as has been noted, the Taliban (and, by extension, al-Qaeda, which Khadr has also been associated with) are (again) not “state parties”. One could argue that this is a semantic objection, and that while the letter of the convention’s stipulations is perhaps left unsatisfied, the spirit thereof still applies. This, I think, is true. But even in that case, by the UN’s own definition a “child soldier” must be under the age of 15 years. Khadr did not meet this criteria at the time of his capture. So if one wants to appeal to UN conventions to decry Khadr’s situation, one is (sorry to say) out of luck.

Of course, the question can be raised as to whether a UN convention is really the foremost international legal authority in this matter. It might be better to look at the International Criminal Court’s statutes instead, since (unlike the UN), the ICC actually has power to prosecute “war criminals” to some degree.

With that in mind, the ICC’s Rome Statute stipulates that “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities” is a war crime.

So here again, international law does not work out in Omar Khadr’s favour: at the time of his capture, he was (just) old enough to not be designated, under international law, as a child soldier.

Note that I’m neither agreeing with Khadr’s being incarcerated at Gitmo. Given that prisoners there are often tortured, I can’t really say that I support sending anyone there. However, I do dispute Matt Good’s appeal to international law on this matter; unfortunately, as regards young Mr. Khadr, the law is inapplicable here.

Of course, your average kill-em-all pundit thinks it all pathetic, that the video demonstrates that the CSIS agents that questioned Khadr displayed a semblance of compassion. But let’s remember one thing — they left him there. In fact, they, and the government of this country at the time, and currently, are just as complicit as those holding Khadr.

So what does that make us, exactly?

Well, it doesn’t say much about the moral fortutide of the Canadian government, admittedly. But then, neither does the fact that Henry Morgentaler is still apparently going to be receiving the Order of Canada. And unfortunately, Mr. Good is also over-simplifying matters somewhat in his statement here: it’s not as though the CSIS agents could have just escorted Mr. Khadr out of the prison at their leisure. Yes, he’s ostensibly a Canadian citizen, but he was arrested in the course of engaging in hostilities against American soldiers in Afghanistan. Under the same international law that Mr. Good erroneously appealed to earlier on, the U.S. does have a right to detain him in a facility of their choosing.

We can add to this observation the Chestertonian wisdom that to have a right is not at all the same thing as to be right in exercising it. Equally, though, Matt Good’s charge of Canadian “complicity” in the Khadr affair is off-base and incorrect; under the applicable laws, there’s actually not much the Canadian government can do. And now that Mr. Khadr is 21, the question also might be asked why anyone should feel that the Canadian government is obligated to do anything at all for an open supporter of Islamic terrorism whose own direct actions led to the death of a U.S. medic.

And in typically left-wing fashion, Mr. Good can’t resist implying that those with whom he disagrees are irrational, uncompassionate, and “back woods xenophobes”. Oh, and “Conservative mouthpieces” — leaving aside the fact that Mr. Good is himself something of a mouthpiece for Amnesty International, an organization that I (for one) no longer support because they now include abortion advocacy in their mandate.

Well, if you’re a Conservative mouthpiece from rural Saskatchewan that adorns their blog with the picture of a deal animal, it makes us noble allies in a xenophobic war against a religion of evil. If you’re a rational and compassionate human being that has the ability to view the complexities and personal history of Khadr’s situation, one that isn’t some back woods xenophobe and has grown up in a highly diverse multicultural area, it makes you sick to your stomach. If you’re a Canadian that believes that this nation is not the sort of nation that stands shoulder to shoulder with those that have been responsible for holding individuals for years only to discover that many of them are innocent (see the McClatchy reports from June), despite the fact that they’ve been denied their rights under the law and international conventions while, at the same time, those holding them profess to be globally instilling the virtues of the rule of law, then you have cause for serious concern. Because that is not what my grandfather and two of my great uncles fought to defend sixty some odd years ago, and that is certainly not the nation in which I want to die.

With respect to Mr. Good, I grew up in a fairly “diverse multicultural” environment, but this is not what makes me sick to my stomach regarding the issue of Mr. Khadr. Quite frankly, I don’t care what the colour of his skin is; I care that he chose to side with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and I care that he killed a U.S. medic with a grenade. What makes me sick to my stomach is the fact that he has been tortured, but I have no problem at all with the fact that he has been captured and incarcerated.

Were he Caucasian, I would say as much. Were he Catholic, I would say as much. Were he my own kin, I would say as much. In each case, I would say as much because I believe that people must accept the consequences of their actions, and I note that Omar Khadr’s documented actions were, at every turn, antithetical to the very principles that Mr. Good’s grandfather and two great uncles fought to defend.

I have traveled across this country almost seventy times, coast to coast, and seen more of it, and its people, than the majority of Canadians ever will. And I can honestly say, given my experiences, the acceptance, and even the participation, in such criminality is not what this country stands for.

If CSIS agents interviewed Khadr that means that our government has been complicit in condoning US detentions and all that they entail.

I agree that Canada should not be complicit in torture. But equally, I don’t think Canada should be complicit in releasing known terrorists back into the wild, so to speak. I don’t think it’s right that Omar Khadr has been tortured — that is, as I have said, a grave moral evil. But by saying that, I in no way mean to suggest that he should be released from custody.

If Canada stands for human rights, if Canada stands for freedom, and if Canada stands up for what is right, then Canada should work to ensure that known supporters and agents of terrorism are captured, tried, and incarcerated accordingly, with every bit as much vigour as she should work to oppose the use of torture against same.

In saying as much, I suppose that I do disagree, somewhat, with Small Dead Animals, the blog that Mr. Good is directing his ire against. Generally, on political matters, I agree with SDA to one degree or another, and it is one of my daily reads. But as far as I know, the operator of SDA, Kate, is not Catholic, so obviously I don’t agree with her sentiments that Omar Khadr “deserved to be dispatched then and there” (i.e. on the battlefield, by the surviving U.S. troops).

So it seems that at least some of the intelligence on which the current war in Iraq was initially based was actually true: Saddam Hussein did in fact have nuclear materials — specifically, “yellowcake” uranium stores. Over five hundred tons of yellowcake, in fact.

It’s in Canada now.

There is a happy ending. This stuff is not in the hands of terrorists, thanks to President Bush’s actions for which he has been hammered by the left for 5+ years. Reported AP:

The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth “tens of millions of dollars.” A Cameco spokesman, Lyle Krahn, declined to discuss the price, but said the yellowcake will be processed at facilities in Ontario for use in energy-producing reactors.

Maybe we can buy some of that electricity since Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid refuses to allow his precious Yucca Mountain to be used to store spent nuclear rods.

And apparently that wasn’t all that was found.

I suppose the question could be asked why George W. Bush has allowed the Left to lambaste him for “lying” about Iraqi WMDs for the last few years, why the transfer of the relevant materials is only now becoming public. But then, to ask that would be to misunderstand the nature of politics and leadership, especially in America. It would be to misunderstand the principles of security as well, for some things are simply too volatile to make known until long after they have transpired. Sometimes the sacrifice one must make is to hold forth in silence, against all slings and arrows, though one’s very name be tarred and stained forever because of it — many, many lives might well hang in the balance.

Keeping something like yellowcake out of the hands of terrorists, and out of the hands of those with ill intent regarding nuclear materials (e.g. Iran), is something worthy of such silence.

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Over in Pakistan, the friends and family of one of the London Tube bombers have gathered at his grave to celebrate his life and “martyrdom” (read: murder/suicide).

Remember what is happening here: people are gathering to cheer and celebrate the life of a man whose final act was to participate in a suicide-bombing attack that killed 52 people and wounded over 700. And they are gathering to celebrate that bodycount as well.

What’s perhaps even more shocking in all of this is that England sent the terrorist’s body home for a proper burial; whose bright idea was that?

Three guesses as to which religious prophet he is, in part, named after.

And the first two don’t count.

Strangely, morons like Haroon Siddiqui have jobs, while people like Kathy Shaidle — not only a far better orator in general, but also with something more important to say — are out of work. This is especially unfair in light of Siddiqui’s most recent offering of drivel.

The difference between what the Nazis said about the Jews and what people today are saying about radical Muslims is…

What we’re saying about radical Muslims is true.

To pretend otherwise is to perform the intellectual equivalent of hiding Nazis in your attic during World War II.

Whereas The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a proven hoax (something millions of your fellow Muslims seem too stupid to figure out or too stubborn to admit), the many declarations of radical Muslims of their intent to take over the world are all too true — they uttered those words themselves; have been doing so before your favourite punching bag, George Bush, was even born; and have been captured doing so on video.

Please present me with similar statements by Jews — let alone Baha’i (that’s the correct spelling btw).

You can’t, can you?

(And an aside to Mr. Farber, assuming he really said what you claim he did — should the unlikely day dawn when Baha’i fly stolen planes into buildings and incinerate 3000 people alive, or mutilate the genitals of millions of women, or slice up their little boys as part of “religious festivals”, or take over a school and rape pre-pubescent girls in front of their classmates, then shoot them in the back as they try to run away, then plenty of us will be more than willing to hate them for it, and we won’t be silenced either, especially not by an out of touch, would-be bully like Mr. Farber.)

Millions of us want to know: why do so many Muslims do things like that, Mr. Siddiqui?

And why don’t more of your fellow Muslims condemn them, loudly, publicly and without the usual “buts” about Israel’s or America’s mostly imaginary equivalence? Now that would be a column worth writing.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Apparently yet another furor is about to erupt over a depiction of Muhammad.This time, the offending example is at a church in Belgium, the Catholic church of Our Lady in the town of Dendermonde. The depiction itself is on the pulpit, the base of which is a carving of two angels treading upon a man who is believed to be Muhammad.

And yes, the church is now under police guard, and the fear is that attacks on the church (and possibly churchgoers?) will be perpetrated. Such things have happened before during Muslim riots.

My thought, though, is that the church should keep the pulpit in place since, after all, it’s probably a more or less truthful depiction of the facts at hand. Islam’s prophet was, by and large, a detestable man, but in a more general sense there is not a human being who was ever walked the Earth who was even worth the role of footstool to the angels. Muhammad would be so lucky as to be something upon which angels tread.

“We sanctify life, not death,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Wednesday during a Mount Herzl ceremony for victims of terror attacks.

“I cannot help but think of how deep the moral gap is between us and our enemies,” he said. “We make every possible effort to limit and focus our attacks on the terrorists and we never intentionally harm the innocent. We don’t have jihadists, shahidim or mothers who joyfully send their children with bomb belts to blow themselves up in packed buses or in busy malls.”

It’s a pity that Olmert’s actions, as Prime Minister of Israel, haven’t always demonstrated the understanding of his terrorist enemies as his words do here.

Still, he makes a valid point, one which is worth repeating.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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Quite nearly a lethal dose of irony.

The leader of the Dutch chapter of the Ex-Muslim movement, Ehsan Jami, has decided to disband the group, claiming that people are too frightened to join because of Islamist threats. Mr Jami sits on the municipal council in Voorburg, formerly for the Labour Party, now as an independent. He presented plans for a committee for former Muslims last year. He was subsequently assaulted in the street and was provided with additional protection.

If one is honest about sharia law, then one must admit that under Sharia, apostasy — that is, the act of leaving a faith (Islam, in this case) — is a crime punishable by death. In what will doubtless come as a shock to those atheists who assert that all religions more or less look the same from the outside, the typical Christian response to apostasy is typically one of prayer (in fact, I’m pretty sure the Pope said several prayers for those who have departed the Catholic faith on his recent U.S. tour).

Coming back to the topic, though, it isn’t surprising — speaking from within the context of at least a cursory understanding of Islamic tenets — that this group was hounded with as many threats as it was. Both “moderate” and radical Muslims advocate for sharia law in many parts of the world, and sharia really only proposes one method of dealing with people who depart Islam for saner climes.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Interesting compare and contrast — while Pope Benedict XVI made a point of visiting a Jewish synagogue to bring a message of “Shalom,” former U.S. president Jimmy Carter met with the leader of Hamas, as well as several other Islamic terror group leaders.

Who, one wonders, really cares for the welfare — physical and spiritual — of the Jews?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Best to read the whole thing. Interestingly, Rehmat does deny that Islam is a “Religion of peace” — although, laughably, he does claim it to be a “religion of tolerance.” That’s a rather ironic comment in light of his later comments praising Ayatollah Khomeni.

Let’s all watch Canada’s new favourite raving Muslim/power-generation engineer rant and rave about how great Hezbollah is, shall we? It’s another pitch-perfect piece that fuses anti-Zionism paranoia with fears of Christian conspiracy, all the while praising Hezbollah as “Lebanon’s Islamic Resistance militia” and noting their commendable “religious dedication, discipline, military skills, large public support base, high morale, good communication and [supply of the] enemy’s military information.”

Yup, he’s a Canadian. Apparently.

Over at Ace of Spades, LauraW and Ace joined the group of folks who have wondered aloud at the strange connection between engineering as an educational discipline and the tendency to become embroiled in radicalism — Ace, in particular, wonders if it’s a “personality type” issue, assuming I read him correctly. And certainly, there has been something of an established trend that has been observed in the past that suggests that engineers are prime recruiting targets for the global jihad.

It’s not hard to see why terrorist groups would want to recruit engineers — backpack nukes and Qassam rockets work so much better when someone with solid, relevant technical know-how has been involved/instrumental in their creation and setup. What’s perhaps harder to see is why engineers would be as apt as they are to sign on with the radicals.

Ace might just be on to something when he notes:

I’m asking because the engineer’s mindset — and likely then the personality type most strongly attracted to the profession — is much concerned with streamlining, simplifying, cutting through bullshit, cutting down on wasteful steps, etc. And I wonder if then doesn’t result in a tendency towards rejection of Politics entirely as simply irrelevant to one’s day-to-day life or else a strong identification with one political faction due to identifying one of any key factors (freedom, security, what have you) as primary and discarding most others as secondary at best.

Certainly, the above describes most engineers I know, including most of the ones I went to school with. But there’s a bit of a problem can emerge in all the simplifying and cutting out. Oh, one expects (as things like Dilbert have reminded us ad nauseum) a certain degree of social isolation to accompany any foray into engineering as a discipline, and certainly most of the people I went to school with could easily be said to fall under the category of “social misfit” — a category I myself an easily a part of.

There was an incident I can think of related to one engineering student in particular who wound up being banned from the University of Alberta campus, in no small part because his life had basically been trimmed to the point where all he had was his engineering, to the point of having forgotten the rules of basic human interaction. Suffice to say, he was banned for stalking a few women (some of whom I know), and I suppose that his doing so shouldn’t have come as the surprise that it did: having cut out all other aspects of normal human-to-human interactive ability from his life, he really had no idea what the proper way to express interest in a member of the opposite sex was anymore.

I think the sort of excessive social isolation that can accompany an education heavy in numbers and equations (untempered by the occasional bold expedition into writing or art) is not particularly different from the sort of social isolation that the young, exciteable men of…say…Palestine feel. Many of the same tensions are present, in fact…especially sexual tension, which fanciful tales of an endless harem of virgins in Paradise appeals to only too easily, and often with deadly results.

It’s a two-fold problem, then. On one hand, terrorist groups in need of people with solid technical training and education, who have only martyrdom and the lure of virgins in Paradise to offer. On the other hand, socially isolated, shy, technically gifted (and highly trained) professionals who’ve spent too much time in their books and wouldn’t mind a little companionship, but who may have next to no idea how to go about finding a companion.

Hmmn…and people wonder why there’s a natural connection here?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

China says foils terrorist plot…yikes. Several English teachers I have known would be able to bite through steel after reading that. Just pitiful.

Here’s a screenshot, just in case someone gets wise and edits the article later.

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And yes, I realize I make typos on this blog every now and again. But then, I’m not an international news organization.

Yes, yes, I know…the official story is that the vicar was pummelled by ‘Asian’ youths. And I realize that it takes the article linked just now a full seven paragraphs to even mention a possible connection to Islam. This blogger, at least, entertains no doubts that the ‘Asian‘ perpetrators of the vicious attack that left Canon Michael Ainsworth hospitalized for blood loss were, in fact, Muslims. That is what one should tend to suspect when British media publications use the word ‘Asian’ to muddy the waters and keep unclear the cultural identities of the perpetrators of violent crimes, especially violent crimes where Jews or Christians are the target.

Worse still is the revelation that attacks of this nature are recurrent, and that they are becoming more commonplace. It speaks to a trend, if not to an orchestrated campaign by Muslims in Britain to commit acts of disruption and violence against other religions, their community leaders, and their worship services. It has even gotten to the point, as the article points out, that Christian clergy are being instructed to hide or remove their clerical collars when out in public.

To date, the patience of the Christian community in the face of these attacks has been more than admirable — it has been, I think, almost saint-like. But as surely as I can recognize that humanity is imperfect, I cannot help but suspect that sooner or later, some yobbos are going to take matters into their own hands after one particular attack on a church or a cleric. That would, I think, spiral the situation completely out of control.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

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A useful site that uses Google Maps as its tech base, and then overlays information in the news about terror attacks on it. It updates every 300 seconds or so. Very cool, if somewhat sobering.

What’s interesting to note is that while the whole world is indeed affected by acts of terrorism which get displayed on the map (there was even a recent incident in Prince George, B.C., in which a drunken man hijacked a bus with five passengers), there is a palpable difference in the “quality” of the incidents in, say, North America versus those in the Muslim world. The most violent incidents are, obviously, found in the latter.

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Arab terrorists kill ten at a Jewish seminary. At least one terrorist is shot in the head by a student who happened to bring a handgun to the seminary that day. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Palestinians flowed into the street cheering for joy at the news of yet more dead Jews.

Just another day in Israel, unfortunately.

This was a barbaric act, these shootings, and equally barbaric is the public celebration of the deaths of Jewish seminarians in the streets of Gaza City. Hamas even offered their blessings upon “the operation,” although they apparently did not claim responsibility.

I read something interesting on another blog that was a remark about genocide: against the threat of genocide, there can be no disproportionate response. That’s a sentiment with which I’d mostly agree, although I might tighten it a bit: against the threat of genocide, there can be no response — short of genocide in reverse — which can be considered disproportionate.

I think that, on the whole, Israel has shown a commendable restraint in how it has dealt with the past few decades worth of terrorism and attempts by various Muslim nations to effect genocidal plans against her. For having done so, Israel’s every action is condemned even more harshly by the rest of the world, while attacks against her are excused as being “the most one can expect” from an “oppressed people” such as the Palestinians.

I do not pretend that Israel is blameless, nor that she has always been in the right. But by the same token, the Palestinians have received billions — has it been trillions yet? — in foreign aid monies, most of which has then been forwarded to Israel in the form of Qassam rockets. Does anyone out there think that there could not be peace in the region of Israel almost overnight if the residents of Palestine gave up Jew-killing as their national sport, purged the religious fanatics from their government, and turned those aid monies over to urban renewal projects and the development of a comprehensive education system? Of course, the problem with the Palestinians building themselves a viable nation-state is that, if they give up the conflict with Israel, then they will have no other issue with which to stoke up global sympathy for their (mostly self-inflicted) “plight,” which might dry up the flow of UN payments somewhat.

And we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?

“Inspired by God, Hamas fighters battle on“

That’s the headline of a Reuters news piece that features an interview with a Hamas fighter on “the Gaza Strip’s front line.” Apparently, Hamas is no longer a terrorist organization that desires the genocidal extermination of the Jews of Israel; at some point, it evidently became a beleagured band of freedom fighters struggling to free its people from the yoke of Zionist oppression. I must have missed that memo.

Update: Screenshot of the article taken this morning, just in case it “happens to change” later on:

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…in one chart:

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Israel’s predominantly Muslim neighbours do not want peace, no matter what lie they are telling in any given week. They want nothing more, nor anything less, than to wipe out the Jews. There will be no peace in the region of Israel until such time as that goal becomes a reality.

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An important trial in France revealed the Pallywood fauxtography machine and its media pipeline. Last week, expert testimony supported media critic Philippe Karsenty’s claim that France 2 reporter Charles Enderlin’s coverage of the Mohammad al-Dura affair was doctored and staged.

Karsenty appealed a verdict that he libeled Enderlin when he questioned the claim that Israel killed the boy who was crouching behind his father during a gunfight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian shooters. 

Al-Dura’s iconic image sped around the world and sold stamps, T shirts and the Second Intifada. It inspired violence, riots, terrorism and became a 21st century blood libel. On March 3, Israel’s Haaretz reported the stunning news that if the boy and his father were actually shot at all, the bullets could not have come from Israel’s position, only the Palestinians’.

Not that there should ever have been a reason to trust footage emerging from Palestine, but it’s nice to know that when an independent researcher finally gets a chance to look at the situation, the falsehood of the Palestinian claims is easily demonstrated. Mohammad al-Dura’s “murder” was what launched a wave of terror attacks against Jews and Israel…and it was all a lie.

Update: Welcome, Steynians! Welcome, WebElf readers!

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So the IDF goes into Gaza Strip to deal with terrorist elements, meets the challenge 100-2, and then pulls out before the job is even half-way finished.

Meanwhile Hamas uses the IDF pull-out to simultaneously do three things: 1) Announce victory, 2) call for a ceasefire, and finally 3) continue to launch rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.

Until and unless the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Fatah are wiped out, and all who espouse their poisonous views killed or incarcerated (or somehow, miraculously, compelled or inspired to change their warped views), there will be no peace in and around the state of Israel. I don’t think we should delude ourselves into thinking otherwise.

Just what it says, O Reader:

Six Qassams were fired from the northern Gaza Strip towards the western Negev since Sunday morning. All the rockets landed in open areas, without causing injuries or damage. The Salah al-Din Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committees‘ military wing, claimed responsibility for firing the rockets. The organization’s spokesman, Muhammad Abed al-Aal, told Ynet that the firing operation, dubbed “the lines of fire”, was a response to the “crimes of the Israeli occupation against the Palestinians,” but also “in response to the cartoons published in Denmark degrading the memory of Prophet Muhammad.

“The Palestinian resistance has committed to respond to the cartoons, and this is our initial response,” he added. Asked why the residents of Sderot and the Negev should pay the price for cartoons published in Denmark, Abed al-Aal responded, “The Jews have also hurt Islam and have also hurt the Koran in their prisons, as part of the plot to harm Islam and the memory and status of Prophet Muhammad. “The Palestinian resistance will not let Israel’s crimes and the smearing of Islam’s symbols go unanswered,” he said.

Makes pefect sense, doesn’t it, O Reader: the Danes publish some pictures of the (false) prophet Muhammad, and the Palestinians launch rockets at the Jews in Israel in response. And we’re trying to negotiate with these savages, and sending them aid packages? How much of that aid money gets transfered to Israel in the shape and form of Qassam rockets, I wonder?

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